Gardening soap

I had decided to make a really pretty soap and I thought it would be such a great idea to use Cochineal to color it pink.  Enough of Rumex oil already.  Enough of subtle shades.  Lets go for gusto.  Cochineal is a bug that had been used for centuries to dye pink and red.  It gives vibrant colours and is soluble in water.  I've used it to dye wool and got a beautiful strong pink.  So I thought I'd try it because sometimes I would like to try some really strong colors for a change.  And I thought I would use the little aluminum tart forms that I have, but line them with cling film, even if it shows.  And then I thought I'd use some of the Poppy seeds that I collected last fall and make it this bright pink flower shaped gardeners soap.

Well, apparently the universe likes me to stick to soft and natural.  I prepared the Cochineal by grinding up a few bugs and adding them to water until the colors was really saturated and way too strong for what I intended.  When I added the lye the water turned to purple, as was to be expected, but when I added the oils and started to stir, the colour simply disappeared.  I had this happen once with Logwood, a beautiful purple that refused to participate in a soap making adventure.  Since I really didn't want as wishy-washy nondescript soap I grabbed my bottle of ... no not Rumex oil, but Rheum oil (that's Rhubarb to you and me).  As I poured it into the soap I could see great red color swirls and they soon turned the soap pink and I was quite happy.  Usually Rumex and Rheum oils turn a tan colour at first, changing overnight to pink.  But this was fine with me.  Immediately pink.  Great.  So I put some Lavender, Lemongrass and Rosewood essential oils into it and then my poppy seeds, poured it into the little moulds and went to bed.

I made a really small recipe, only 260 g. / 9.2 oz, the smallest batch I've ever tried.

Olive oil 33%  

Coconut oil 33% 

Soybean oil 10%

Sunflower oil 10%

Cocoa butter 14%

The next morning this surprising result waited for me.  Exactly what I hadn't wanted:  A rather insipid, undecided, plain, dull, nondescript, wishy-washy colour, if it even deserves that noun.  And to make matters worse, it had a really really thick layer of ash.  I don't mind some ash, but this was really thick.  I don't know how the colour managed to change from a lovely, and yes soft, pink to a really weird blueish-in-some-places-pinkish-in-others-and-no-real-colour-at-all-in-between.  But it did.  And after looking at it for a few weeks (and a hard day of gardening in the allotment garden) I used it and decided that it wasn't a miserable failure after all.  It was a nice size, it smelled lovely, it had a nice lather and the Poppy seeds gave it just the perfect scrub without being too rough.  Just perfectly natural and slightly irregular like the life I live, the vegetables I grow and the raised beds that I built.

Happy summer

Today is the First day of summer and the sun is shining even if the temperature is 6C or 43F. But that is usual for this time of year and is actually quite warm for the time of year.  Today is an old traditional holiday and we give gifts on this day.  I received a gift myself yesterday when I found some timber that was being thrown out.  I got permission to salvage it and took it to my Allotment garden where it will become more raised beds.

Last fall, well it was November actually, I built some raised beds out of very similar timbers that I also salvaged from a skip.  Since I had some more wood I also knocked together some frames to use as covers.  I just need to get glass or plastic to cover them and then I have the perfect cold frame.  I have also made a primitive deck out of pallet wood, so  mom and I can sit in the sun and admire all our hard work.  I just need to find a good small table.  Or I could build one.

I wish I could say that I have a green thumb, but to be honest I have quite a few miserable failures.  I did sow some seeds about a month ago and although most of them sprouted I tend to leave them to long before I prick them out.  But "better late than never" so today I'm salvaging the rest .  I have pricked out about half of my seedlings, the Sweet Peas (Lathyrus odorous) and the pretty pink Morning Glory (Ipomoea), also an annual of which I save the seeds from every year.  They are doing well and need to go into larger pots.  I also managed to pot the Lily bulbs I bought, Lilium regale, and also the Sarah Bernhardt Peonie which I don't already have in my garden for some strange reason.  I'm going to keep her in a pot for the time being.  I don't want to loose her to the cold.  I was also given some Foxglove (Digitalis) rosettes which grow like weeds in a friends's garden.  I have tried to sow its seed, but never had any luck with getting the plants to flower, so now I'm excited.

I haven't really started the vegetables yet, although I sowed some basil, lettuce and spinach, but I killed some of them off with neglect.  So I need to start those again pretty soon.  This year I'll sow the regulars, carrots, broccoli, beets, cauliflower, lettuce and kale.  I bought seeds of the dark green Italian Nero di Toscana, which tastes amazing.  I want to grow a few plants of this and make chips from it.  And I think I'll try turnips this year.  I had never tasted them until I decided to try them recently and I really, really like them.  Not to forget the most Icelandic of crops, the rutabaga, or swede.  I've only grown it once before, they take up a lot of space, but they are so good when homegrown that it's worth growing a few.

I also sowed some dye plants, and I plan to dedicate a portion of the allotment to those.  Some are perennials and the rest tend to be invasive annuals so I should have plenty of materials in years to come.  I have Madder (Rubia tinctoria), Woad (Isatis tinctoria), Japanese indigo (Polygonum tinctorium), Calleopsis (Coreopsis tinctorium), Dyers Chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria) and Weld (Reseda luteola). I need to plant these on and perhaps sow a few more seed.  I may live to regret this, but I don't think one can have too many dye plants.  Oh, by the way, it it a pretty good indication that a plant is a good dye plant if the second part of the latin name is "tinctoria" (or similar) in the same way that "officinale" designates medicinal plants.

Homemade Mascarpone for Easter's Lemon cake

Yesterday I made Mascarpone.  I've been wanting to try to make cheeses for the longest time and had some cream.  Mascarpone is one of the easiest things one can make in the cheese department.  So I went ahead and made some.  I also made Lemon cake for desert on Easter Sunday (which is today - Happy Easter :) and thought I could try the Mascarpone with that.  I always serve whipped cream with it and there will be some of that too because my family aren't really as adventurous as I am.

Everything tastes better with whipped cream and when in Italy last year, I looked for cream in the Italian grocery stores, but could only find Mascarpone.  I bought it because I had to have something with my strawberries.  I hadn't really tasted it that much before.  I knew that it is used in Tiramisu, but that was about it.  I got used to it after a while, it's very, very creamy.  But yesterday I used Google to find recipes, although I have two books about cheese making which I could have used (I need to find those).  I found many recipes for Mascarpone, the blogs Baking obsession,  Not without salt and Make it from scratch all have recipes and lovely photos.  Another website that I found which is excellent is Fankhauser's cheese page.  It's just a wealth of information about cheese making of all sorts.

But the Mascarpone is really easy to make.  I used:

2.5 deciliters whipping cream (that is 250 ml or about 1 cup)
1/2 tbsp Lemon juice

Just heat the cream in a water bath.  I put it into a saucepan which I put into a larger pot containing water.  I could have used a bowl in the pot.  Doesn't matter, but it's best to heat the cream gently and stir regularly.  Heat until it reaches 85C / 190F then add the lemon juice and continue to stir for 5 minutes while holding the temperature constant. The cream will thicken somewhat.  Don't worry if you don't notice a massive change.  I didn't and I've read many comments about that.  Just make sure you reach the right temperature and hold it for 5 minutes and follow the rest of the instructions.  It should turn out just fine.

Now, I followed the advise of Dr. Fankhauser and covered it and put it in the refrigerator overnight.  But some people just let it cool on the counter for 20-30 minutes.  I will prbably try that next time.  Just make sure that you don't disturb it while it's cooling.  It's the same as with yoghurt, which hates to be disturbed while doing it's thing.

But the next step, either way you choose to do it, is to line a sieve with a moistened cheesecloth.  And the moistened part makes a difference, I think, because then it drains a bit better.  I failed to do that.  But anyway, put the future Mascarpone into the lined sieve, then gather the corners and let it hang, preferably in the fridge, for a few hours.

I just had to taste it even if it isn't quite ready and it was very nice, thick and creamy with some mashed strawberries and honey that I had left from breakfast.  Yesterday I also made a cottage cheese/Ricotta type cheese from milk and I chopped up some Pineapple peelings to make enzyme cleaner and then I made a little soap.  It feels good to be back in the swing of things.

Just because I thought you'd like it.

The mailman brought me a package the other day.  It was a gift.  Just because she thought I'd like it.  That is just very nice.  It's actually incredibly and absolutely wonderful that she would do that for me.  Just out of the blue.  It came at just the right time to cheer me up and give me the warmest glow of gratitude.

The Usnea lichen is the most wonderful lichen and it doesn't grow here.  So receiving a thickly padded envelope was just fantastic (not to forget the Bay leaves that have been flavoring my dinners - lovely:).  I have been holding it and touching it and suppressing the thought that I can't possibly use it.  So I did use a part of it, precisely because I felt so reluctant.  I decided to put one third of it into alcohol for a tincture and I actually managed to do that.  The tincture will take about 6 weeks and then I have a wonderful medicine.  Usnea tincture is antibiotic, antibacterial, antifungal, astringent, antiviral, and diuretic.  I just finished a dose of penicillin to get rid of a constant fever.  No high temperatures, but just a little bit that didn't go away and made me lethargic and disinterested in everything.  So now I have to suffer the consequences of killing off every friendly bacteria in my body.  So lots of yoghurt.  I look forward to trying the Usnea next time I need to treat an infection.  No nasty side effects.

I had been blaming my genes and winter for my low.  I am inordinately proud of being a quarter German because here most people are just Icelandic.  Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to about 800 A.D. and sometimes even a bit further, usually to Norwegian kings.  Of course, wouldn't you know it, I'm really a princess!  And we are all pretty much related.  If you take any two Icelanders, you'll usually find a common ancestor in the 8th or 9th generation.  My husband and I are really far apart, only with common ancestors in the 10th generation.

But all that aside.  Americans were of course, when I moved there, not very impressed since everyone there is originally from somewhere else.  And I do not think the British, that I met when I lived there, were too impressed either.  But I enjoy being a bit different from my countrymen.  And it is with a bit of pride that I point to my German genes as an explanation for my dislike of cold weather and intolerance for the dark.  My German grandmother was very brave to marry my grandfather and move to Iceland in the 1920's.  They met when my grandfather was studying electrical engineering and working in the Siemens factory in Berlin.

She was a factory girl and she was poor.  Her father had shot himself in front of his wife and three young children after gambling, probably not the family fortune, but pretty much all they had.  So my grandmother, despite protestations from her family, who naturally didn't want her living amongst eskimos in igloos, left Berlin and moved to Husavik, a small village where my great grandfather was the owner of the local store and fairly well off.  My grandparents soon moved to Reykjavik and had three children, my mother being the youngest.  My grandmother did get to travel back to Germany and her family (tante Lotta and onkel Walter) came to visit her.  My grandfather was a senior civil servant, so they were comfortable.  But she died of bone cancer at 59.  I was four, but I have a few precious memories of her.  She was beautiful, she loved pretty things, and at the same time she was wonderfully thrifty.  I like to think I got that from her too.  My mother has the same reaction to winter as I do, but my father, who was from a very remote area far north, never seemed to feel it.  Of course that makes sense, it's just survival.  I'd have withered away and died in the middle ages up there.

But back to the Usnea.  The rest will go to dyeing wool.  A part will be used for dyeing some Alpaca wool in a water bath and a third (and what is left of the water bath lichen) will be fermented in ammonia to see what comes out of it.  I'm really feeling an excitement for dyeing now.  So much so that I was inspired to order a book about lichen dyeing (called Lichen dyeing) that I've been wanting, but has been out of print for the longest time.  And just magically it was available on Amazon.

And then the casing for my duvet arrived from Germany.  And it looks really good.  I love it and really, really want to get a new duvet soon.  Which will not happen since my recent bout of inertia has been rather all-encompassing and I haven't touched the Eiderdown, so still 200 grams.  Only 800 to go.  But I'm back in the swing of things, thoroughly fed up with doing nothing.  And Cocobong - thank you :)